You know, that’s actually the best explanation I’ve heard so far.
By virtue of writing this paper, they have just created the field guide on what to avoid doing on the Internet for all future time travelers. Didn’t they understand that that you can’t discover something when you tell everyone who doesn’t want to be discovered how to avoid being discovered? The time travelers will know that criteria in the future and be able to implement it in the past before the researchers even came up with the criteria.
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And that’s why they didn’t find anything.
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I guess the paper is actually a search for “time travellers who have not otherwise advertised their existence but are nonetheless either ambivalent about or insufficiently technically inclined to succeed in hiding their network presence”.
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Wasted?! Are you nuts? It’s faaabulous!
And I would give almost anything to see/hear the proposal that got this project actually approved! My Gawd. It had to be magnificent!
My vote goes for “They were clearly trolling for an IgNobel Award.” I think it’s really against the spirit of the competition to make a deliberate try at a prize.
I’m a huge fan of time travel stories of all kinds. One that though was interesting was a movie Timescape, released on video as Grand Tour: Disaster in Time. I like the theory that if you were looking for time travelers they would want to go to famous disasters.
So in this case the time travelers arrive early waiting for that disaster. One thing we could do is scour the video/images of famous disasters and see if we can spot the time travelers.
I recall years ago there was someone claiming to be a time traveler on the internet (I have been unable to find the archives). Something about being sent back to retrieve servers for data recovery. Didn’t buy a word of it, but it was one hell of a story. Especially the bit about how post industrial-collapse the internet consists of mesh networks and the bulk of entertainment is amateur productions (this was pre-youtube).
I think all these questions have been addressed already.
We have a winner
Throughout history, those who have witnessed time travel events have recorded their experiences in what is called “holy scripture” in a collection of reports called “The Bible”. Throughout the Bible there are recorded events and testimony about time travelers from a future time called “Heaven” on earth, and the ruler of the earth is a living robot called “The Lord” who has eternal life like all the other solid-state humans.
Ezekiel wrote about witnessing a robotic probe sent into the past by the head robot in the future, and in the case of Jesus, who reportedly became that robot in the future, those people who have the time travel technology in the future are warning us about all the things that are happening in these times, because only those doing as Jesus advised were saved once The Software of Life was unleashed as written, and living robots slaughtered all the genetic humans, as written in the book of revelation.
One does not need to look very hard for evidence of time travel on earth throughout history, for those conducting it have made it very prominant, having killed Jesus on a cross to ensure everyone pays attention to the reports they sent back to us so we may survive also.
PS: I am not a religious person, I am a scientist.
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I don’t get the idea behind this study - why is the assumption that a time traveler would get on the internet to search about things that they know are happening in the future?
Is it some sort of movie reality they are envisioning - ooh if they’ve traveled in time they obviously don’t know the exact time and date they’ve arrived at and will want to find out if they still have a chance to save aunt Mirna from that earthquake in Naples, invest in bitcoin, or whatever.
Why would you, coming into the past, search for information from the our future but still in your past. Actually, why would you go online at all. I mean I know the reasons I go online, to keep up on current events, but that’s because I’m not prescient, and when I’m on vacation I tend to go online a lot less. Why are these time travelers supposed to be going online?
to look for someplace to eat?
Please. Interest in time travel is not new, and this article is not news. This very same Internet study was reported in Scientific American, March 1963, albeit just as a small article in the -50, 100 and 150 years ago section.
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Suggested clue for finding time travellers: look for statistical anomalies in state lottery payouts. Like smuggling and counterfeiting, the clues will appear in distortions of the aggregate.
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The problem lies in that they were looking for time travelers from the future, not the past. The plan proceeds as expected. No further communications will be produced using this medium.
And if we destroy or hide any such images, we increase the probability of time travellers appearing there, because they won’t know about the evidence they are leaving,
Yeah we should just look for evidence of the crimes of Jack the Ripper in the 1980s.
Been there done that, We already have forward time machines in real life. They just aren’t very efficient forward time machines. (ISS and other reallydamnfast objects that are habitable.)
Dude’s name was John Titor. He showed up in forums off and on claiming to be from the dystopic future. He was searching, I believe for an IBM 5100 (or something like that. Definitely an antique IBM.) Steins Gate riffed on this guy.
I think John Titor might be a single person, but I have the feeling that it’s a stand-alone complex, and the original Titor may never have existed as a poster.
